On 4 July 2024, the European Banking Authority (EBA) issued new Guidelines (GLs) on the travel rule, namely the information that should accompany transfers of funds and certain crypto-assets. This rule will help tackle the abuse of such transfers for money laundering (ML) and terrorist financing (TF) purposes.
The Travel Rule GLs specify what information should accompany a transfer of funds or crypto-assets and also list the steps that payment service providers (PSPs), intermediary PSPs (IPSPs), crypto-asset service providers (CASPs) and intermediary CASPs (ICASPs) should take to detect missing or incomplete information, and what they should do if a transfer of funds or of crypto-assets lacks the required information.
In June 2023, Regulation 2023/1113/EU (TFR) had entered into force. It recasts Regulation 2015/847/EU and brings the EU’s legal framework in line with the Financial Action Task Force (FATF)’s standards by extending the obligation to include information about the originator and beneficiary to CASPs (the ‘travel rule’). It also amends Directive 2015/849/EU (AMLD V) to subject CASPs, which are authorised in line with Regulation 2023/1114/EU (MiCAR) to the same anti-money laundering/countering of terrorist financing (AML/CFT) requirements and AML/CFT supervision as credit and financial institutions. The deadline for competent authorities (CAs) to report whether they comply with the GLs will be 2 months after the publication of the translations into the official EU languages. The amending GLs will apply from 30 December 2024.
